On the day that Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes announced his intentions to run a second time against the man who soundly defeated him last month, the Times prints another black eye for Hynes's scandal-ridden campaign. The key witness in a 1995 murder case of a 4-year-old girl says he was coached by police into testifying against the wrong man.
Hynes's office is (ever-so-slowly) reviewing roughly 40 cases in which prosecutors may have conducted flawed cases based on shoddy, illegal police work. At the heart of that investigation is retired detective Louis Scarcella, who definitely used the same crack-addled eyewitness in at least six different murder cases, and allegedly let cooperating witnesses out of jail to visit prostitutes, among other colorful claims against Scarcella's police work. Scarcella helped lock up David Ranta, who was released from prison earlier this year after a judge ruled that he was wrongfully convicted of murdering a rabbi in 1990.
In the instance of 4-year-old Shamone Johnson, who was murdered in a hail of bullets intended for rival gang members, Scarcella merely extracted a confession from the defendant in the case, Sundhe Moses, who says the detective beat him to get it.
Other officers allegedly showed Johnson's cousin, Sharron Ivory, photographs of Moses and all but told him who they wanted him to testify against.
“I didn’t recognize anyone,” Mr. Ivory told The New York Times in a telephone interview from Eastern Correctional Facility, a prison in Ulster County where he is serving time in an unrelated homicide. “The cops would say the number out loud and say, ‘Take a good look at it,’ so I went with it. I thought they knew what they were doing. And I figured if it wasn’t him, he could beat it at trial.”
Mr. Ivory said the prosecutor who visited him in prison several weeks ago casually mentioned that he could face perjury charges if he changed the story he had testified to be true.
Mr. Moses was sentenced to 16 years to life for Shamone’s death.
“I feel bad,” Mr. Ivory said. “I wouldn’t want somebody to be in jail for something they didn’t do.”
